Gregory Jackson

An Organizational Approach to Comparative Corporate Governance: Costs, Contingencies, and Complementarities

This paper develops an organizational approach to corporate governance and assesses the effectiveness of corporate governance and implications for policy. Most corporate governance research focuses on a universal link between corporate governance practices (e.g., board structure, shareholder activism) and performance outcomes, but neglects how interdependencies between the organization and diverse environments lead to variations in the effectiveness of different governance practices. In contrast to such closed systems approaches, we propose a framework based on open systems approaches to organizations, which examines these organizational interdependencies in terms of the costs, contingencies, and complementarities of different corporate governance practices. These three sets of organizational factors are useful in analyzing the effectiveness of corporate governance in diverse organizational environments. We also explore the impact of costs, contingencies, and complementarities on the effectiveness of different governance aspects through the use of stylized cases and discuss the implications for different approaches to policy such as soft law or hard law.

Comparative and International Corporate Governance

In this article, we examine the state of the art in comparative and international corporate governance by identifying the key research questions, main concepts, and paradigms of explanations of cross-country diversity in corporate governance. First, we discuss the multiple definitions of corporate governance across disciplines and explore how this multi-dimensional nature of corporate governance posses challenges when making cross-national comparisons. Second, we review existing comparative research on corporate governance and highlight some of the main characteristics of comparative analysis. Third, we analyze how comparative corporate governance has been understood from four different scholarly perspectives: economics and management, culture and sociology, legal, and political paradigms. We conclude from this third section that future research should make an effort to

From Comparing Capitalisms to the Politics of Institutional Change

ABSTRACT The notion of distinct national varieties or systems of capitalism gained considerable currency in the last two decades. This review essay highlights three theoretical premises which define what we call the comparative capitalisms (CC) approach to political economy: First, national economies are characterized by distinct institutional configurations; second, these configurations are a source of comparative institutional advantage; and third, the configurations are stabilized by institutional path dependence. Within these common premises, the CC literature contains a number of competing theories and we highlight the fundamental distinctions among them and draw out their respective limitations. We specifically examine the role of politics within the CC literature and how emerging conceptions of politics may contribute to understanding institutional change in capitalist systems.

Retrospective evaluation of cardio-pulmonary fibrotic side effects in symptomatic patients from a group of 234 Parkinson’s disease patients treated with cabergoline

Summary.Background: Cardiac valvulopathy has been recently associated with the use of the ergot dopamine agonist (EDA) pergolide in Parkinson’s disease (PD). Cabergoline a widely used, well-tolerated EDA which has also been recently implicated in relation to fibrotic side effects although the evidence base for this is not sound.Aims: In PD patients on chronic cabergoline therapy, do symptoms suggestive of serosal/cardiac fibrosis imply underlying fibrotic lesions?Methods: A retrospective data review of 234 PD cases from three UK centres, on chronic cabergoline monotherapy or adjunctive treatment to identify symptoms suggestive of pleuro-pulmonary, cardiac or retroperitoneal fibrosis. These causes were thereafter selectively examined by appropriate specialists with relevant investigations.Conclusions: Out of 234 cases, 15 were identified with symptoms suggestive of respiratory, cardiac or abdominal systems involvement although subsequent investigations failed to reveal definite association with cabergoline except two cases with probable alveolitis and a possible association with cardiac murmur in one case. In spite of the deficiencies of a retrospective study, the results suggest a low risk of fibrotic side effects with cabergoline, particularly cardiac valvulopathy.

The long-term trajectories of institutional change in European capitalism

The article provides a theoretical overview and empirical summary of the contributions to this collection. The collection makes four contributions to the literature on comparative capitalism. First, its analysis of institutional change adopts a long-term historical perspective that allows us to observe the potentially transformative effects of relatively slow and incremental changes. Second, it examines the linkages between four levels of institutions that regulate the economy – the international, macro (national), meso and micro. Third, the national case studies compare change and linkages across six core institutional domains. And fourth, the cases show how institutions are shaped by different sets of socio-political compromises.

Between Financial Commitment, Market Liquidity and Corporate Governance: Occupational Pensions in Britain, Germany, Japan and the USA

Estimates of the comparative health of the North Americanand Western European economies and societies have had their fashion cycles -from Servain-Schreibers warnings that Europe was falling behind, rather thancatching up with, American technological leadership in the 1960s, to Europeanexasperation over American trade and budget deficits in the 1970s, to anxietiesover Eurosclerosis in the early 1980s and over the American loss ofinternational competitiveness in the late 1980s. Presently, by all accounts, thesick man is again Europe, with higher unemployment and much lower rates of jobcreation over the last two decades or so. The main problem is a rising level oflong-term unemployment that mainly affects unskilled workers and, in mostcountries, young job seekers with low levels of schooling.This book challenges the popular thesis of a downward trend in the viability of welfare states in competitive market economies. With approaches ranging from historical case studies to cross-national analyses, the contributors explore various aspects of the relationships between welfare states, industrial relations, financial government and production systems. Building upon and combining comparative studies of both the varieties of capitalism and the worlds of welfare state regimes, the book considers issues such as the role of employers and unions in social policy, the interdependencies between financial markets and pension systems, and the current welfare reform process. Comparing Welfare Capitalism sheds new light on the tenuous relationship between social policies and market economies.

The trajectory of institutional change in Germany, 1979–2009

Over the last three decades, the German political economy can be characterized by both institutional continuity and change. Understanding the dynamics of institutional change therefore requires an examination of the interplay of changes in formal institutional rules and how organizations respond to these changes by strategic attempts to promote or hinder further change in institutions. The macro-level political story of institutional change shows a number of paradoxes resulting in unexpected and often incomplete forms of market liberalization shaped by continued support for some core features of Germanys social market economy. The resulting erosion of Germanys co-ordinated model of economic organization through networks and business associations has gone hand-in-hand with the attempts to preserve these institutions for core workers and sectors of the economy in the face of changing environments. The result is a more varied institutional landscape characterized by international diffusion of liberal policies and the politics of their variable re-embedding within a long-term path of institutional continuity.

The Japanese firm and its diversity

Abstract While institutional theory has tended to ignore the diversity of firms within national models of capitalism, recent change in the Japanese model of capitalism has been associated with a growing diversity of corporate governance practices. The article builds on previous empirical results to propose an empirical mapping of corporate governance practices in Japan using a cluster analysis of a large sample of Japanese firms in 2002. Alongside the traditional Japanese pattern, the empirical results show that two new ‘hybrid’ models of corporate governance have emerged characterized by different linkages between corporate ownership and finance, board practices, and employment patterns. These changes reflect both a loosening of past institutional constraints related to main bank finance and growing responsiveness to diverse organizational and sector-level contingencies.

Across Boundaries: The Global Challenges Facing Workers and Employment Research

The overall complexity of employment relations today raises new challenges for scholars to extend their work across the boundaries of particular geographies, organizations, theoretical perspectives and disciplines. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the British Journal of Industrial Relations, this article introduces key aspects of global challenges facing employees and research on employment relations. Drawing on the articles of this anniversary issue, we identify several theoretical concepts drawn from the wider social sciences that have proven useful in understanding global challenges around global value chains, transnational and multi-level institutional frameworks, and the role of global finance. We also identify and discuss the emergence of new actors that have a growing salience for global employment research and the establishment of more global forms of worker representation. By further developing theoretical concepts around these global challenges, we argue that employment relations research will increase its dialogue with and distinctive contribution to wider debates in the social sciences.

Understanding complementarities as organizational configurations : using set theoretical methods

The growing literature on complementarities has drawn attention to how the effects of different organizational structures, practices, and institutions are interdependent. Rather than one best way of organizing, complementarities suggest that the effectiveness of one organizational element may be dependent on the presence or absence of another particular element. Consequently, organizational arrangements often display “multiple equilibria” or what is known as equifinality, whereby multiple pathways may lead to the same or similar outcomes. While being a source of theoretical innovation, the configurational nature of complementarities has posed a number of challenges. This chapter reviews the emerging literature on complementarities to identify a series of conceptual challenges related to understanding complementarities as organizational configurations, and examines the methodological challenges in studying how such elements combine to produce joint effects on performance. The chapter argues that new set-theoretic methods using Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) may present a very useful methodological alternative to studying complementarities. The chapter illustrates this potential by re-analyzing past work by Aoki, Jackson, and Miyajima (2007) on relationships between ownership structure, board structure, and employment practices of listed firms in Japan to show evidence of complementarities associated with hybrid configurations that combine market and relational forms of organization.